Book Review: How to Unite the Left on Animals

Image: the cover of the book is a collage of images, the background is a colorful image of outer space with a large crack going down the right side. Superimposed is a semi transparent veganarchist symbol (a circle around an A and upsidedown V) and on top of that in white letters is "how to unite the left on animals." Below that in small white letters is, "a handbook on total liberationist veganism and a shared reality." On the lower left is an image if a cow with lines dividing up his body into parts with commodity labels and a barcode is supermposed over his eyes. On the lower right in white letters is "John Tallent."

It might be odd to say that I often know how much I have in common with an author when I feel the urge to write reviews that are way too long and am able to come up with a lot of criticisms. Insert infighting among the left joke here. Seriously though, I was eagerly anticipating How to Unite the Left on Animals having followed the author's writing online and generally finding it refreshing. It is difficult to describe how absolutely isolating it can be as a collective liberationist vegan at a time when it's not as cool to be vegan and leftist anymore. It's even more isolating when so many vegan events are run by the minority who may be more privileged, health focused only, single issue, etc. Living with the reality that atrocities are occurring on a scale that is unfathomable on a daily basis towards other animals only becomes harder when many humans I respect in the struggle for human liberation and climate change refuse to even engage with the subject, or worse, spread tokenizing fallacies or strawmen to quell their cognitive dissonance about our own parts in the destruction of the lives of most of the species on this planet. The idea especially that we can fight climate change without fighting farmed animal exploitation is truly nonsensical. That said, I don't blame some of them.  

I'd say for every trashfire of disingenuous takes on veganism for viral clout or as a way to avoid responsibility, there's one with a valid point or simply non-malicious ignorance. Much like white feminism, single issue class war folks, or any other struggle where those at the greatest advantage within the sub group have the loudest voices, supremacy and misinformation spread. In addition, there is great diversity in belief systems across all kinds of struggles. This makes the best organizing efforts very messy. I can say from experience that it can be absolutely devastating to look at ones own fault rather than pointing the fingers at someone else. Having to look at oneself as the powerful one, in this case in relation to other than human animals, is very hard for leftists- especially those of us of marginalized groups. On top of all of that, being exposed to and truly engaging with the enormity and horrific details of what other animals are going through is traumatizing. It is even worse if you've been part of rescues hands-on like I have- vicarious trauma has actually messed up my life more than stuff that has happened directly to me. That sort of trauma can make you act like an asshole- I'm again speaking from experience. I have been that vegan and I've also been the person arguing with that vegan.  

Now that decades have passed and I've learned a lot, I still find myself irritated by both sides. I am annoyed by the health food vegans that say they can't believe I've had cancer 3 times, think weed and plant based diets will cure all diseases, and that sick/disabled/fat/etc vegans can't possibly exist. I abhor the white guy big brained racists named Gary who try to destroy the lives of bipoc vegans just as I am irritated by the nonvegans tokenizing and silencing the same people. I get angry as a unhealthy disabled, "very low income" vegan, who lives in public housing and on food donations, to have these realities tokenized by middle to owning class white people to talk about why veganism is oppressive and how their choice to exploit animals is somehow the same as indigenous subsistence hunting or my need to take life sustaining meds in gelatin capsules. Hell, I was at a food bank today and many of the people there were vegan or vegetarian for ethical or cultural reasons, to the point that the volunteers there all knew to tell us when things had meat in them. I have seen criticisms from vegans doing food justice work in low-income communities being told by nonvegan people who have never lived in one of those communities how classist veganism is. It's another example of how identity politics has become simple virtue signaling for a lot of people seeking to avoid engaging seriously with issues while still feeling good about their position on them. 

That brings me to one of the first advantages of Tallent's book- he acknowledges where he comes from, where he's been, where he is now, and where he wants to go. He includes a couple of stories in the beginning that I wish I had not read, but at the same time think can work well to disarm the reader. I think people sometimes see people like myself and the author as having been the way we are since birth. This creates the fallacy that we've been all knowing and therefore couldn't possibly know where the other person has come from when the reality is most of us caused deliberate harm to other animals for many years or decades before choosing to become vegans. Many of us had all of the same excuses and held many of the same ignorant beliefs. On the other side of the coin many of us forget where we come from which is also a problem. I'm glad that the author did not do that here. 

I must say that I was actually surprised by the quality of this book. I knew that the ideas would be there but given that it is self-published, I kind of expected it to be a mess. There are some things that could have been better with the editing, but it doesn't read like a self-published book. I can tell that the author thought and read a lot about everything that he discusses in the book. The bibliography is appropriately large. I think given Tallent's background and demographics that he did quite well to engage with a variety of ideas without resorting to cherry picking or tokenism. For instance, in his discussions of various arguments against veganism, I found the section on indigenous veganism and tokenism to be very well thought out. He doesn't fall into the trap of quoting a few indigenous vegans as tokens to make his argument. He genuinely engages with all of the discussions and lifts up voices that have led these struggles while also engaging with their words. He admits his own limitations and therefore looks to others for that wisdom. It's a complex discussion to have and I found it to be well done. I think his approach to that topic could be used on pretty much any topic regarding veganism in regards to marginalized populations. 

Another good thing about this book is that it's technically academic, but it is written in a way that is very readable and accessible. There are a few sections that get a little wordy, but overall it is written in a way that someone coming from a variety of places can grasp what he is talking about. The only assumption really is that the reader is coming from somewhere on or near the left political spectrum. As a result the reader gets exposed to a lot of the ideas of the more academic writers without all of the unnecessary and isolating jargon. 

I also want to point out where it goes in the other direction though. I did not know that the author was a former follower of Gary Francione. I don't fault him for this, all of us tend to have looked up to some of the bigger names in animal rights philosophy especially in the beginning of our journeys. For those who do not know, Gary Francione is one of the aforementioned racist vegans named Gary and is most well known for his "abolitionist approach" which is not without merit had he not chosen to mutate and weaponize it against others. He has spent years (maybe decades at this point?) trying to completely decimate the voices of BIPOC vegans including getting them removed from speaking events and basically orchestrating group harassment and cancellation- particularly of Black vegans who did the important work of uplifting the voices of a massive chunk of the vegan population throughout the world. He has recently turned his attention on trans people with the same sort of fervor. Tallent may not have known this entire history but he does know the recent events and nonetheless includes copious amounts of quotations and viewpoints from Francione in this book. Worse, he portrays Francione as someone who tries to engage with and support leftist causes, when he is in fact the prime example of a liberal who will use a human rights cause to make an animal rights argument, then promptly attack the same human cause when it's inconvenient. I was going to link to something for this, but there are so many examples that just googling Gar Francione racism will give you pages of examples of both. If I was a person who wasn't yet sold and knew about this man, I might have discounted this book early on seeing just how much he was quoted. There is one section where Tallent discusses the "fathers" of animal rights from this very white male centered point of view. He adds a paragraph listing a bunch of eco-feminist and bipoc vegan thinkers, with great diversity in their viewpoints, but doesn't engage with any of them like he did with the works of Singer and Francione. He also doesn't devote much time to highlighting the oppressive views of these men. Later in the book he does get around to engaging with the ideas of marginalized vegans. But, the way these initial sections are structured makes it seem like marginalized vegans are an afterthought and may cause people to give up early. That's a shame because the rest of the book is really good. 

My other big criticism of the book is how he uses the idea of personhood. He regularly refers to other animals as people, which is not something I necessarily disagree with. However I do not feel that he engaged enough with what the idea of personhood is in relation to other animals, especially given the fact that humans are one species and other animals are a multitude of species each of which has their own needs. If the reader is coming from a non-vegan, non-liberation lens, simply being told that animals are people is not something that's going to sway them. Even many vegans would not be swayed by this as the fallacy of other animals as a homogenized entity of innocent voiceless children is common among some vegans. 

I would say that the most important part of this book is how Tallent more specifically defines veganism as a flexible practice rather than a fixed and one dimensional identity. Technically veganism has always been a flexible practice. It is literally impossible to avoid every single instance of animal harm and use in any society whether it be from stepping on insects by accident to animal products involved in transportation structures of every kind. But, in most people's minds, veganism is just a plant based diet, not a practice of seeking to avoid exploiting others as far as is possible and practicable. The author really expands upon this, engaging with all of the legitimate criticisms of strict plant-based one-dimensional dietary veganism. Total liberationist veganism as defined in this book includes people of any ability, background, identity, location, and so forth who are seeking to avoid exploiting other animals in every way that they possibly can. This section and all of the other ways in which the author truly engages with the arguments from both sides are the biggest strengths of the book. The hardest part will be getting nonvegan people to read it in the first place, but once they do I think that their hackles will go down quite quickly when they realize that they are being addressed with respect and attention rather than dismissal.  

One thing I really would have liked more of in this book is something from the perspective of other than human animals. It falls into the trap sometimes that many of these sort of philosophy type texts do of describing what happens to other animals and the horrors they go through without really talking about things from the animal centered point of view. We of course can only know so much about that, but there is a known history of other animals resisting their oppression, working together against their captors, taking care of one another at sites of exploitation or at sanctuaries, or simply having experiences of suffering that extend past what we see on the outside. I would have liked animals to be present more in this book about uniting the left on animals. However, if you want to keep a book at a reasonable length that's focused on addressing human arguments, I guess it makes sense that you would devote the text more to humans than you would towards other animals.

 I do hope people will give this book a shot. Just like any book it's not perfect, but it's a pretty amazing feat for a self-published book. I hope leftists that are vegan and those who are not will consider picking it up and engaging with what's inside because I do think at the very least that it can help facilitate conversations between us that can help us better include everyone else on the planet outside of humans in our efforts. I think it can also aid in us working together between diverse and conflicting groups of humans when those struggles arise. This book also offers a lot of suggestions for further reading placing it in a lexicon of many voices that are equally important on this topic. Neither I nor the author are positioning this as some sort of singular Bible. It is another voice added to an important pile on a topic that we have to engage with before we absolutely destroy this entire planet and everyone else on it. I hope we still have time to change.  

This was also posted to my Goodreads.

 

Book Review: Inversion

 

Image: the cover of the book is an illustration of a circular multicolor background surrounding a sphere in the center with a dark border. Inside the sphere is a lush landscape with a waterfall, trees, a blue sky, and a bird flying across the horizon. Outside of the circle is a large hand reaching over top. Across the top in Orange letters is the author's name and below that inversion is in blue letters. Below that in small white letters is the quote Aric McBay's inversion is a masterpiece of utopian resistance by Octavia Cade. And the lower right corner in Orange letters is blacked on series with the symbol of an a inside two circles.

Inversion took me way longer than it should have to get through and review, but not for the usual reasons. You should know that it is indeed impossible to wash, sanitize, and dry a paperback ARC after dropping it in a flushed hospital toilet. I guess I was driven enough to finish it that I tried not to just throw it away. Eventually, I found a way to make a pdf slightly readable on my ereader and started over from the beginning despite being halfway through. I'm glad I did, as I realized how much I had missed in the spaced out world of stress I started it in.

Sometimes when nonfiction writers try their hand at fiction, it's just bad. I often go in expecting this so I can be surprised if I'm wrong. Aric Mcbay's book was indeed a pleasant surprise. I found it to be well written and structured and to fulfill the goals of AK Press' Black Dawn series well. 

The book involves a clash of cultures and authoritarianism across multiple universes, being representative of both utopian imaginings and the realities of colonialist and fascist rule. While I can't say for sure without asking the author, I saw a lot of Ursula K Leguin influence in this book. This is entirely unsurprising for an anarchist author, but far left anti-authoritarianism isn't my main reasoning for the comparison. There is this way that Leguin, and more recently writers like NK Jemisin with the Broken Earth trilogy, straddle the blurred borders between fantasy and sci-fi that invokes a specific feeling that I struggle to explain. I often avoid fantasy books because they're so often about an old timey kingdom with a few impossible humanoids and dragons or whatever. I tend to lean into science fiction because my brain is more able to fall into a world that feels more possible and I am more attracted to things that seem to be from the present or future rather than the past for whatever reason. There are some authors that draw me into stories outside of my usual preferences and this book did well with that. We have the more stereotypical sci-fi elements of multiverse travel, nonlinear time lapses, and advanced technology mixed with that of fantastic reincarnation and birth, low/no-tech nature dwelling peoples, and old school conquerors. 

The book is centered on the points of view of two characters, one from each side of a violent invasion, but both of whom come from a place outside of the authoritarian regime seeking to occupy and claim territory. The location being attacked and colonized is also home to several separate cultures who are different in many ways but who coexist cooperatively. I especially liked this touch because often in these stories you have two sides generally, the invaders and the indigenous. This book has multiple groups on both sides. And anyone who's ever sat through a long anarchist meeting will relate to some of the ways they work things out together. It also shows that the idea of "utopia" is not really a one dimensional perfect goodness, but a continued effort by all parties to sustain a collective and cooperative society which unfortunately sometimes involves figuring out what to do when you are attacked by a group that shares none of your values.

I think the book could have handled the inclusion of other animals better. I'm always surprised when a book written by an eco-leftist type that includes an indigenous or other group immersed in a more earth centered life uses everyone else on the planet as a sort if story prop or occasional meal. The obvious symbolism of the buffalo is overshadowed by seeing other animals as less-than, especially when our two protagonists have a discussion about procreation. The various human cultures though were interesting and well explored. 

I'm going to keep it vague so as not to spoil anything. McBay definitely shows us that he's able to tackle both nonfiction and fiction writing with this book. I appreciate AK's effort with this series to expose readers to bigger, better worlds in science fiction.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Atoms Never Touch

 Image: The cover of the book is a black background with spirals and lines scribbled all over in thin white ink. In the center, in red, green, and blue rounded letters outlined in white is, "atoms never touch." Across the top in small green letters in a box is "emergent strategy series." Across the bottom in blue letters in a white box is micha cárdenas. Below that in red letters in a box is "foreword by adrienne maree brown."

This is a review I have admittedly dreaded writing. I already feel anxious writing a negative review for any book that isn't obscenely oppressive because writing is difficult and I generally think exploring one's creativity regardless of skill is a worthwhile endeavor. I admire micha cárdenas' organizing work on behalf of migrants and have enjoyed the nonfiction writing of hers that I have read. In fact, her essay in another emergent strategy series book - Pleasure Activism - was one of the few that made an otherwise mediocre book a worthwhile read. Given that she has such a wide array of talents, I was looking forward to reading her foray into fiction with Atoms Never Touch. Unfortunately, she is mortal like all of us and there is a limit to her abilities.

To be frank, this book reads like a first draft of a first fiction attempt written by someone who thinks fiction is different from nonfiction in terms of skill needed to write it successfully. An analogy to cárdenas' academic work would be if I decided to write an academic essay in the field she has a PhD in, did no research and no editing and then submitted it to be published in a journal alongside hers. Perhaps blame also lies at the feet of adrienne maree brown who writes a gushing foreword showing that she has read and should have edited or given feedback to her friend before sending this to press. Even if the story was good and the plot and subject matter made sense and were well researched, the writing style is unskilled and very obvious edits would have made it easier to read. In the first paragraph I could already tell what I was in for. It's the kind of writing with repetitive and unnecessary descriptions, "she took her bag to the sink, she put it on the counter by the sink, she washed her hands in the sink then picked up her bag from the counter by the sink," (this is not a direct quote but a fake example since I am reading from an ARC.) It's also one of the biggest examples of writing by someone who has not heard the phrase "show don't tell."

I do not think that this book could have been saved by better writing or editing however. The story itself does not make sense and the book does not know what it wants to be. A large chunk of it is essentially, "so I time traveled to another dimension again, anyway, here's 15 pages on why I like going to the gym and 20 more about this girl I met. Oh yeah time travel is like a huge part of my life but let's not even talk about or describe it, it's completely destroyed everything I know and love but it barely deserves mention and hasn't affected me emotionally really at all, here's 25 more pages about my date." If the science fiction part, which tries and fails to have some basis in fact, was attended to at all, this would be a different book. I was already put off by the title because it in itself represents misinformation. I was willing to forgive this until the titular line inside the book itself where two womens "atoms touched" causing a cascade of events which again made no sense. People who write successful science fiction books- especially those that include things rooted in reality like physics- do research on the topics they include rather than just putting what they think they might mean onto a page.

This book maybe could have been a lesbian love story with all of the half cocked scifi stuff left out of it. Also, the randomly added part where a new trans girl enters the chat (to avoid spoilers you will understand what I mean when you get to it,) felt tokenizing and kind of gross. This might have been able to be fashioned into a near future cyberpunk lesbian love story given the "auglens" technology involved, but the politics within the story necessary for a decent dystopia are also incredibly transparent and carbon copies of a Trump presidency. It's nearly word for word retelling something from real life with no metaphor or allegory in sight. The love story itself is not good, but it at least offers something that we don't see very often in a lot of romance writing. We know from books like This is How You Lose the Time War that a skilled author can indeed write an excellent time travel queer romance novel that draws in fans of all genres. ANT unfortunately fails in all of the ways TiHYLtTW succeeds.

Do I believe the author should never have tried her hand at fiction? No. Creative endeavors are always a good idea. If you want to publish though, take some classes, do a lot of practice writing, get people to read it who will offer actual constructive criticism, scrap the bad drafts, and start over. Choose a topic- time travel OR dystopia OR near future critique of technology, etc- and spend a ton of time doing research to build a believable narrative. If you can pull it off, maybe you can pull off more. The only way this book would have succeeded is if those who read it were honest with the author and told her they love her passion and to start again by including a ton of feedback they had for her. Decent fiction writing, like all of the nonfiction writing that the author has successfully done, takes talent, time, practice, and help. I hope that the next time she gives it a shot, she has a better foundation to draw from, puts more time into researching the story and outlining a structure, and has better folks in her corner with the willingness and ability to help her make it better. Until then, I will stick with where the author's talent and training lie- in her nonfiction work.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Better Living Through Birding

Image: The cover of the book is a photograph mostly composed of a blue sky with sparse white clouds. At the bottom of the image, shown from the waist up is Christian Cooper- a man with brown skin wearing a gray shirt with a rainbow flag in the pattern of an american flag, a blue bandanna around his neck, a strap across his chest, a wrist watch, holding binoculars up to his eyes as he smiles, looking upward through them. In black letters across the top is "better living through birding" with a small cartoon of a red winged blackbird perched on the g of through. Below that in orange letters is "notes from a black man in the natural world." And below that in black letters is the author's name.

Like many people, I was introduced to Christian Cooper through his viral video in central park as a woman called the police and lied about him threatening her when he asked her to leash her dog in a protected area of the park. I am surprised though that I had not encountered him sooner since he has been involved with a variety of causes and mediums that I interact with regularly. There are too few people in the world with so much overlap of gay stuff, nerd stuff, and bird stuff. The more I learned about him, the more surprised I was that I was just encountering him now.

A friend of mine read Better Living Through Birding before me and told me to go for the audiobook when I was trying to decide which format to choose. She was not a fan of the structure on the page and thought his voice would take it up a notch for me. It was a good decision because I have had even less time and focus for reading pages than usual and hearing Cooper tell these stories added something enjoyable to the text. The audio version also implemented bird songs between various chapters, but it was done without proper editing. There were times that the song did not even match the bird species of the chapter that followed and since they never explicitly tell you who the song is from, it risks misinforming more than adding to the knowledge and experience of the listener. The recordings were also extremely different in volume from the rest of the book, and some of the recordings felt awkward or too long.

The book is a mixture of memoir and general essays about Cooper's experiences with birding. I can see how some readers felt misled. The title and hype for the book make it seem like a birding book when it is really a book about growing up as a gay Black boy and man, working in the world of comics when it was even less inclusive than it is now, navigating travel and gay culture across the world in various decades, and of course, lots of birding along the way. I loved the overlap of these different parts of Cooper's life, so I was not let down at all by it not being a birding-only book. I really enjoyed the sections where he would focus on a specific species of bird and go into detail about how he discovered them and what made them so special. I also really enjoyed his stories of when cultures would overlap and intersect, especially around birding and comics. My favorite story about his comics career was when he decided to turn the once sexist marvel swimsuit issue into what Warren Ellis affectionately called, "The gayest thing you ever saw." I laughed out loud and immediately had to google it and was not at all disappointed. Most of my interactions with comics were through DC Vertigo (with the exception of the X-Men,) so I never ran into any of this until I listened to this audiobook.

There were a few things I found disappointing about this book. Most of them were the ways in which Cooper fell in line with problematic but very common attributes of society and subcultures. In terms of birding, he refers to all birds as the objectified "it" even when speaking directly of male or female birds. He focuses almost entirely on flashy rare birds or males of the species. We do get a section about appreciating grackles (my favorite backyard birds) through the eyes of children, but only after he describes a bunch of arbitrary negative qualities he perceives in them. He has a section where he decries the keeping of birds (meaning some species of birds like parrots) in cages, but remains completely oblivious to the conflict that view has with another chapter in which he discusses wanting to kill the chickens at a monastery because he didn't prepare enough for his vegetarian trip (where some trail mix and protein bars easily could have solved his issues.) He, like many other birders, seem intentionally ignorant of the fact that chickens (and turkeys, ducks, and all other farmed/hunted species,) are indeed birds. Much like people who say they are "animal lovers" who only love dogs and cats. Farmed species are birds who are killed and suffer in unimaginably greater numbers than the already awful amounts in wild species. And even if he and other birders cannot bring themselves to care about these relatives of jungle fowl, water fowl, and wild turkeys, their exploitation and oppression is directly linked to the decline of wild species from deforestation to climate change to industrial farming and loss of avian biodiversity. 

His politics are very run of the mill centrist liberal. He even has a small section talking about all of the "good cops" out there because one time a cop didn't murder him or whatever. He talks about not understanding #defundthepolice at first, but later becoming enlightened. He then goes on to speak badly of #abolishthepolice because he clearly does not understand that either, but instead of educating himself, he defends cops some more. He, like many people, is most interested in understanding issues that affect his own demographics personally. Black women are never factored into his many discussions about police violence and other members of the LGBTQ population aside from gay cis men don't get much play either. He also has interesting views on tokenization/fetishization that can be understandable but still troublesome. In other words, Christian Cooper is just an average gay dude with average beliefs and understandings of various things in a lot of ways. This is fine. It would be unfair to expect him to be exceptional in every way after viral fame. I just didn't expect to run into quite so many examples of him lacking awareness or consideration of others related to him and the wild birds he so loves.

I feel a little guilty giving such a long take down of his faults, but chose to do so to balance out the massive amount of fawning over him that others are doing. The unfortunate problem that comes with being a minority of a minority of a minority in the public eye is that people outside those groups will look to him as the authority on everything. It's not fair to him or the rest of us. So, these criticisms are also to say that he does not represent everyone and is allowed to be an average gay dude birder like any other. I have immense respect for everything he has accomplished and all of the joyful trail blazing he has done. I love that there are no doubt Black and gay folks and comic nerds who were connected to birding through becoming aware of him and his work. I believe he has had and will continue to have a positive influence on birding culture in general. I hope that over time he can open his mind more and expand his consideration to all birds and more marginalized people. I would also really love if he wrote another book that was solely a birding book. It would be nice to see something in the reference section produced through his unique lens.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: The Reformatory

Image: The cover of the book is a Floridian swamp like scene with an ombre sunset going from shades of peach down to hues of purple. Three trees are silhouetted behind a small building resembling an old schoolhouse and silhouettes of cornstalks line the sides. Across the top in off-white letters framed by filigree lines is "the reformatory." Above that in small written black letters is "a novel." Across the bottom in small white letters is "american book award-winning author" and below that in larger peach letters is "Tananarive Due."
 

As a long time fan of Tananarive Due, I was excited to find out about The Reformatory- her first full length novel in over a decade. I first discovered her in the Dark Matter anthology and have enjoyed multiple novels and stories of hers. There have always been, ahem, horrifying themes in her horror. Racism, abuse, mental illness crises, murder, body horror, etc have been present in the past. But, this book took me some time to get through. It was one of those books that I could have read in a few days and instead took weeks. I think maybe if my life wasn't so unstable right now, I might have been able to take it in larger doses. I regularly thought of The Nickel Boys while reading this and I see that I was not the only one. Both texts taking place in the Jim Crow south and involve lots of violence towards children in an institutionalized setting, which is horrifying enough. Add haints haunting the place to the mix and it's on another level.

Like other novels of Due's, I felt myself slip into the world she created quite seamlessly. At times I couldn't tell if there was a little too much exposition or just enough, but overall it felt like I was there. I'm 40, so writers and those who share their history have created the world for me to experience having never been there. I believe she did this well. I also found the right characters likable and was rooting for them, which is part of what helps the reader get through such a depressing setting. There were also some gray-area characters- a well off white women who helps out but also screws up due to her own ignorance and privilege, Black men working at the reformatory acting as both oppressed and oppressor, etc, that were well crafted.

I can sometimes find a stark line between when something is trauma/torture porn (an obvious series example is Them) and trauma informed but creative horror (like Get Out.) I wasn't sure where the line was in this book. The true monsters of the book are Jim Crow and wider white supremacy, not the haints. But, there were times where I thought, "Did we need this long, detailed scene?" I found myself dreading a depiction of violence that was alluded to multiple times, but was thankfully not present, because the scenes that were there were brutal. I also think that the reformatory warden in this book is so evil that it can come off as cartoonish at times, allowing (especially white) readers to separate themselves and everyone they know from this inhuman devil, rather than seeing him as a part of the same species. Sometimes a villain that is most terrifying is one you could easily see yourself interacting with in rather everyday, normal ways. Maybe some white folks who were around in the South back then would feel that way about Haddock, but I personally could not. I am not sure if that's my own ignorance or just the fact that I don't hang out with cops and wardens in general.

While reading this book, I also watched Till which I was interested in in part due to the decision by Chinonye Chukwu not to depict physical violence against Black bodies on the screen. The movie was able to convey the horrors without it, but it is also not a horror movie or a fictional tale. It is the story of a well known piece of history with the fresher element of centering Emmett Till's mother. In the end, searching for that line I asked myself this: Can you ever tell the truth through fiction without depicting things that are horrifying? In historical fiction like The Reformatory, the backdrop is an actual history of many of these things actually happening to young Black boys. There were some truly sadistic people who regularly did horrific things while both enjoying them and receiving rewards. We have the lynching photos to prove it.

Something else I noticed was how Due used nonhuman animals throughout the story to show racism and oppression in interesting ways. The use of dogs as both imprisoned creatures forced to do harm and valued weapons (as extensions of their masters' egos more than actual care) trained in the most terrifying horrors was a repeated theme- both being treated better than Black people in some scenarios and not in others. There was also use of pigs and their terror in exploitation and slaughter as vehicles for understanding the feelings of prisoners, relating to their cries and identifying them as someone who is terrified rather than an object to be consumed. I notice these things often- how we as humans both relate to and distance ourselves from other animals in a variety of ways. I noticed them more than average in this book.

I originally was going to give this a 4 star rating, due to some of the aforementioned topics and also how many of the perspective changes mid chapter made things clunky. But, the ending sequence pulled that up to a 5 for me. One of my biggest gripes about so many horror novels (and movies and shows) is that I find some of the endings so boring or unsatisfying. The end sequence is the most exciting part of the book and the way things go is dark but also satisfying. It doesn't suddenly diverge from the time period to give you a an unrealistically happy conclusion, but it also doesn't leave you feeling completely gutted. I think that's probably the only way to enjoy horror based in reality like this. I hope Due's next novel comes a little sooner than this one did. I missed her.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Prophet

The cover of the book shows a large silver spherical shape on a silver background. Below the sphere is a dark shadow with the silhouette of two small people standing under it. Across the top in large black letters is "prophet" and "a novel" in small letters below that. Across the bottom in white letters is Sin Blache and Helen MacDonald. Below that in smaller white letters is "author of h is for hawk."

Prophet is a novel that I rate highly for one main reason: It was fun. There are criticisms to be had about plot holes and tropes, but honestly, I chose it on a whim and it was exactly the kind of scifi/horror(?) detour from my current stress-filled existence that I needed. It is like the less horrifying lovechild of Vandermeer's Southern Reach/Area X trilogy, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, and Christopher Nolan's Inception gay fan fiction. I cannot take credit for the latter comparison, but when I read their review, I saw it immediately as the descriptive piece I was missing in my assessments of the book as it progressed. I am not usually a fanfiction person, but my partner and I at the time got playfully into consuming Arthur (them) and Eames (me) fan art and memes (I blush saying this, wishing I was still as confident and shameless as I was in 2010.) I see how people could get really into all of it in general. Apparently the authors desired this, which was an unexpected thing to find when googling them.

The blurb gives you plenty to go on, but I would say this is a book more about relationships than it is about scifi. Or perhaps it is that the relationships are the most fleshed out. However, I would still classify it as more of a scifi book than a romance. I remember the interactions between the people in it more than I recall the weird elements and special abilities in it, but the world it is set in was more immersive than I realized and feels pretty critical for the romance to work as well as it did. I do not know how much each of the authors had to do with writing the story, but I have not read H is for Hawk, so I went in without expectations anyway.

The ending was definitely fantastic. For reasons I will not explain to avoid spoilers, there was part of it that initially made me mad due to a history with tropes but then another part made up for it. I am now curious about what else these authors could create together and apart in a similar genre. Perhaps the style of collaboration is part of what caused some of the flaws. I cannot imagine writing a fiction book on my own let alone with another person I only knew online.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: The Creative Lives of Animals

 

Image: The Cover of the book is a photo of 7 red- throated bee eaters - birds with green and orange bodies,  fanned out tails, long thin black beaks, a black mask line, and red throats- together on a clay wall with several nesting cavities. Weaving in and out of the birds is the title in large white letters. Across the bottom in yellow letters is the authors name: Carol Gigliotti.

I enjoyed reading Carol Gigliotti's The Creative Live of Animals for VINE book club this month. I wanted to wait until after hearing from the author, who kindly joined us, to write this review. Hearing more from her changed some of the ways I thought about this book. 

I love when people reach across fields to write about topics. It can be a mess when done poorly, but when done well, it offers a set of fresh eyes and a different voice- in this case, on animals' ways of experiencing and interacting with the greater world. Gigliotti comes to us as an artist who explores the inner and outer worlds of other animals through the lens of creativity. I believe that this is mostly done well and can create a bridge for people to experience these topics who may not seek out a more academic book. It is not that this is not an academic work. I am struggling to find the words to differentiate this work from the jargony type of text written primarily for others in one's field.

I admit that while reading this book, I found a lot of information from animal intelligence, emotion, language, sexuality, culture, etc that I had already read (though many species-specific things that I had not.) I was struggling to find what made this book stand out specifically as being about creativity itself. Each chapter is full of interesting research, well conveyed, but the descriptions of how creativity fit into the equation were too short for my taste. However, one of the things I liked about this author was the approach of acknowledging how anthropocentric definitions of various terms- including creativity and all others in this paragraph- limit us in understanding what creativity really means for other species. Looking at it that way, I could see her point that things like "intelligence" and other attributes have great overlap with creativity. The various things she chose to combine in this book also make it stand out from others in similar fields.

In terms of studies discussed, I really loved the section on prairie dog language and culture. I know I had read something about this elsewhere, but barely remembered it and it was a joy to read all of the research about these complex communication systems. I also enjoyed learning about the Moscow stray dogs who learned to use the subway systems. As a birder, my most favorite sections were on the languages and creativity of brown thrashers and gray catbirds. I've had the pleasure of listening to and watching the serenades of brown thrashers and catbirds, but had no idea how complex these songs were until this book. We often learn of these birds as "mimics" because they incorporate songs of other birds (and animals, car alarms, etc.) Would we call a composer a mimic for using notes and instruments created by others before them? These were the places I could see very clearly how "creativity" as I understand it came into play. That is not to say bird song is the same as human music- it is far more other-worldly than that in ways we will never be able to truly understand, which is part of why it is so lovely to witness. Field guides will say a species sings to "defend territory" or "attract a mate" which is in part true, but only a small part of the equation. After all, the colonizers running around shooting birds to draw them before returning home to their enslaved house mates (*cough* Audubon *cough*) used to think only male birds sang, which we now know is completely false, as is the notion that there are singular reasons why birds sing and communicate. A book written by an ornithologist might gloss over the creativity aspect which is one of many ways this book shines.

One of the best things about how research was discussed in this book was how the author never shied away from ethics. I complain frequently of how even the most animal liberation minded authors will sometimes include information from gnarly animal studies without comment, I suppose to be more accessible to the fragile colleagues who can't bear to think of a world without animals suffering in laboratory cages. Gigliotti manages to share results while adding something I have not seen said quite the way she did. She not only comments about the ethical issues with the research, but that the research itself hides results from us. Mainly, what would this creativity (or intelligence, etc) that we are studying look like if it were not forced by human hands and defined solely by us?

While listening to the author in book club, I appreciated the discussion of the creativity metric being used as a bridge to bring this information to a wider audience. People put off by words like "agency" might be more willing to read about "creativity." That made me more comfortable with some of my early confusion about what was creativity and what was not. She also shared an anecdote about another author saying something about how the greater than human world is inextricably linked with human creativity. I tried imagining the history of all creativity mediums if other animals were never present and I realized just how intricately they are woven throughout human creative mediums (in some good and not so good ways.) 

All in all, I think this book adds something useful to the shelf of animal studies. I would have liked a tighter grasp and focus on creativity as it branches further away from things like intelligence, but I still learned a lot and, more importantly, learned new ways to think about the lives of myself and other animals. I would love to read a full book by the author on creativity of birds specifically in the future.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Open Throat

 

Image: cover of the book is an ivory background with a stencil like image of the face of a mountain lion. The stencil is all black except for the eyes which are shades of pink orange and yellow. Across the top is the title open throat written and streaks like a marker made up of black, pink, Orange, and yellow. Along the bottom is the author's name Henry hoke in the same style. And small letters along the left side are the words "a novel."

This will be a short review for a short little book. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from Henry Hoke's novel Open Throat. I have had a range of experiences with anthropomorphized accounts of other animals. Let me be clear, when I say anthropomorphized,  I'm not saying that acknowledging that other animals have feelings and inner thoughts is anthropomorphism. I mean a lion speaking a human language in a fantasy-like book form to be read easily by us is. 

Anyway, reading the description about a queer mountain lion romping through California made me think I would be humorously entertained. I did not expect to be brought to tears. I don't know if everyone would have that reaction, but as someone who has dealt with a lot of animal rescue and also tries to create a bridge between humans and other animals to better understand one another, I felt that this author captured something quite real in the way that they wrote about the mountain lion and his life. This mountain lion is no doubt a wild being, but like many animals with lots of interactions with humans such as hikers and campers, there is a level of domestication that happens. There are tons of things in this book that are completely outlandish, but the feelings and thought processes are there, described in ways that humans can digest.

The two particular points in the book- a section about a highway and the ending- were the most emotional for me. I hope that people come into this book looking for entertainment and come out thinking a lot more about what may be going through the minds of other animals that we see as nuisances, pests, dangerous, or any other number of one-dimensional, anthropocentric descriptions. 

This book was a surreal experience of many all too real things.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Practicing New Worlds

 

Image: The cover of the book is a color block illustration of a landscape with reddish brown mountains in the distance and a river of shades of blue cascading down toward the bottom. The river turns into a pathway going up the mountains. It is bordered by yellow mushrooms and turquoise leaves and vines.  In the foreground, the strands of the river are held by two feminine people with their backs to the viewer. One has medium brown skin and long dark hair and the other has darker brown skin with black curly hair. Both have yellow earrings and clothing and a purple butterfly in their hair and on their shoulder. Moving up the path are many figures with a variety of skin tones all clad in light turquoise walking or rolling (via wheelchair or walker) up into the mountains. The sky is a dark blue with speckled stars and a large moon obscured by the mountains.

The non-fiction entries of the emergent strategy series have been a real mixed bag for me. Strangely enough, many entries by the creator herself have left me unsatisfied. For that reason, I'm very glad that she has communicated with so many other contributors to the series, including Andrea J. Ritchie. I'm a big fan of Ritchie's work, so when I saw that Practicing New Worlds was coming out, I was excited to see what her contribution would look like. In the intro, adrienne marie brown mentions thinking she and Ritchie were both part of the same struggle but in very different ways: in essence, Ritchie was doing the practice of legal struggle and systemic change while amb was involved in the imaginative side of things. Ritchie herself is more accustomed to organizing and writing that is very praxis based, always with a "10 point plan." However, two of them found that there was great overlap between these two things, emergent strategy being a huge influence on just how those plans and practices came to be. This, in my opinion, has resulted in one of the best- if not the best- entries in the nonfiction realm of the ES series.

If you are familiar with Ritchie's work, it will come as no surprise that this book provides a very well researched account of various conferences and practices of recent years. It is chock full of excellent quotes from a variety of artists and organizers. The emergent strategy side of things allows Ritchie to be more imaginative in her writing of this. I enjoyed seeing more of the creative side of Ritchie's work in this book. It resulted in the expression of many ideas about tactics that could be tried based on the wisdom gained from things that already have been. The abolitionist goals expressed in this text are equal parts ambitious and idealistic, while also being grounded and rational. 

To offer one of many examples, I really enjoyed the way she talked about decolonization. I have found myself frustrated at how some of the discussions around decolonization seem to convey a falsehood that there are two poles: a complete return to exactly the way things were in the past or strict adherence to everything the way it is now. Ritchie discusses the importance of decolonization being a new world- not a return to some specific (often incorrectly homogenized) culture. Decolonization means creating a culture based on all experiences to date. I like this framing of it much better as it creates more space for healing and it makes much more sense to me as something that can actually happen. It is an idea of a world that indigenous people deserve including their whole selves.

Something else that stuck out to me was something that I really needed to hear at this point in my life. It's not a new idea, but the way Ritchie said it helped me to internalize it more. You may have heard the phrase, "kill the cop in your head." Ritchie talks about how the way we internalize things and speak to ourselves bleeds into the rest of culture. The voice in my head can be one of the cruelest things on the planet and I never want to treat others the way that voice sometimes treats me. This got through to me the importance of me combating that voice not only for my own wellbeing, but to prevent myself from becoming that voice and enacting that mistreatment on others.

Throughout all of the practices, there is a great deal of humility and space for mistakes. This is also extremely important and welcome in a culture where there can be a current a fear that any mistake is a death sentence for one's ability to be a "good" radical. We can make space for mistakes and growth without sacrificing accountability.

Ritchie also includes two visionary fiction stories, this is a really cool exercise. I may try it myself even though I am not a good fiction writer. The point is not to write a masterpiece but to see how creativity gives you ideas that you may not come up with in a strictly real world based thought process.

It was truly enjoyable to see Ritchie's strict attention to detail, organization, and research be combined with exercises of creativity and art. The entire thing is truly a labor of love and one of the biggest assets to the entire emergent strategy series.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Working It

Image: the cover of the book is an illustration/digital painting of a 1983 court photo scene where a dancer charged with obscenity bent over in front of a judge to prove that her clothing was not a violation. The background is light yellow with streaks of oranges and pinks darting out from the center where the woman, drawn in a pinkish hue is standing with her abum pointed away from the viewer. She has a long sleeve shirt on and a pair of very short shorts and high heels. She is bent over at the waist with her curly hair obscuring her face. Across the top in red letters is "working it" and below that in black letters "sex workers on the work of sex." On the bottom left in small black letters is "edited by matilda bickers with peech breshears and janis luna." On the right side is "foreword by Molly Smith."

Content warning for all kinds of trauma and harm you might expect regarding this topic.

I would describe my personal relationship with sex work as... Complicated. I've been sober for almost 19 years (Jesus, really? Seems like yesterday.) In both my years in the grips of a variety of chemicals and those in recovery, the line between sex work and trafficking was not very clear at times for me and for many women I've met. Some were straight up trafficked, but many were in a state of desperation where the drug withdrawal or the desperate need to forget were the ones doing the coercing. I've met women with rapist pimps who would sob in meetings with other women and others whose shame and trauma destroyed all of their relationships. I've had my own less extreme experiences with dealers taking advantage of dope sickness, being a minor around gross adults, or men misleading me into "acting/modeling" for their project that they would turn into porn once I was intoxicated with the substance they paid me in. Men (and sometimes others) lie to and exploit vulnerable women and girls (and marginalized genders and sometimes others) which is not news to most people. As a patron, I had been to a strip club a couple of times while I was using but not often and I don't remember anything extreme in one direction or another. I never encountered a positive or neutral story from a sex worker for many years. So, in my feminist evolution, when I discovered many of the second-wave feminist iterations of sex workers as victims, that made sense to me.

In time, both my understanding of addiction, drug use, and treatment as well as my understanding of sex work evolved quite a lot. (The addiction side will take another far too long post.) I met sober women who decided to continue sex work, often of a different kind, despite other job prospects. I met many trans people across the spectrum who found sex work to be the only, or just the best, employment prospect. I read about many people choosing a variety of kinds of sex work without victimization or coercion aside from the financial coercion of survival that we all have. But, I couldn't get behind much of the sex work activism messaging I'd see from mostly white, non-full service, sex workers which this book refers to aptly as "empowerment narratives" and "girl-bossification." I would think about my life and that of many people I've known and would think, "you all have no idea... Like I'm happy for you, stereotypically attractive fetish model/camgirl, that's great you feel so empowered but that's not most people." Then I'd feel bad, why couldn't I stop having these oppressive, dismissive responses to sex worker voices? I would encounter this again and again in a way that reminds me oddly of how people who I talk to about veganism sometimes understand it- this rich white people health craze, not a diverse collective liberation movement where wealthy and/or white people are actually the minority worldwide. Someone would eventually just say "sex work is work like any other job" without explaining what that even is supposed to mean. It seemed pretty different than other jobs to me.

When I saw this book come out, I figured I'd give it a shot but went in with low expectations. I didn't know the creators or the zine history. I'm really glad I went for it because this was the exact book I have been looking for.

Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex includes a wide variety of (I think mostly or all women) sex workers from many backgrounds, races, histories, types of work, and so on. Most but not all are from North America. Many of the entries are interview formats with the same questions for each person. They are well crafted and in depth prompts for discussion. Others were essays or other formats. Each entry is paired with an image of the worker's choosing which ranged from photos to drawings and more.

Right from the start, I knew this book was speaking my language. The discussion of white girl-bossification of sex work messaging and the wide range of reasons why people do it was at the forefront. Almost everyone discussed the louder voices of a few white sex workers with a hierarchy of sex work types they found respectable or not being a consistent problem. Black and indigenous women discussed the complicated forays through different types of sex work and non sex work jobs and the cultural complexity involved in their lives and choices. The entry on indigenous women drug users who were doing full service work or being trafficked was what I related to most despite being white and they didn't shy away from the reality that most of them wanted out. Trans women discussed dealing with the danger of fragile straight men's fear of being gay. One entry by a woman describing her desk job vs her sex work jobs really helped me understand "sex work is work" on another level. Her artful description of how she experienced the daily grind of each made a ton of sense. Another entry where a worker compared doing full service sex work to doing care work was really great as was the article critiquing enthusiastic consent narratives in regards to sex work. That last one has always bothered me, if you don't want to perform a sexual service but have to to keep your job, is that consensual? The entry was a really frank and helpful discussion regarding the complexity of consent in different situations.

There were also frank discussions of rape, abuse, entitlement of customers, exploitation by clubs and other businesses, and all of the ways sex work is very unsexy. There were discussions of intercommunity trauma and struggle. There were stories of workers making strides by coming together to support one another, stories of the solidarity of groups of people who only really have each other, and the varied ways and tactics that may or may not work to protect sex workers in various industries. Everyone who discussed safety or liberation called for decriminalization. There was a lot more than this, too, that I'm sure will pop into my head after I submit this review.

My only gripe about this book is that there are a few instances of gnarly fat and body shaming. Descriptions of a few men who were god-awful narcissistic customers didn't require me knowing their body size or atypicality to understand that they were really gross, shitty human beings. The idea that fatness was relevant, in a book with frank discussions about whose bodies are most valued in dominant culture, was disappointing. I get what they were trying to say- the entitlement that men have and how they view sex workers as another species practically leads them to treat sex workers in ways they'd never treat other people. There were just details that weren't necessary or even relevant.

Overall, this book really opened my eyes to what sex work is like for people who choose it and why they continue to. It taught me a lot about what "sex work is work" really means at a deeper level and allowed me to hear the voices of women I never get to hear from. I'm going to continue reading and learning more, but at my current level of understanding, this is the best writing I've read about sex work. So, I definitely recommend it to a variety of audiences who want to know more or to relate to the contributors.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Counterweight

 

Image: the cover of the book has an ombre sky that fades from orange upwards to  a pinkish red. There are a few sparse white clouds. Across the center are 8 black butterflies flying across at different distances. In the center is a cable hanging down that holds an eyeball with a blue iris. Across the top in black bold letters is the title Counterweight. Below the eyeball on the left is "a novel, translated by anton hur," and to the right, "Djuna" in large black letters. There is a blue butterfly on the bottom right of the title.

Counterweight found its way into my life by catching my eye with its bizarre cover as I scrolled through my feed. The mysterious author, Djuna, is not someone I was familiar with before this. After reading this book though, I want more.

I have a great love for cyberpunk as a genre, no matter how close its futuristic predictions come to be mere descriptions of our dystopian present. People have claimed that the genre is dead for decades, yet people like me continue to find dismal enjoyment in a variety of mediums from books to games to music to fashion. That said, a lot of cyberpunk can be repetitive cloning of the exact same story or by slapping some neon on a misogynistic diatribe and calling it art. What I like about Counterweight was how it navigated pieces of the genre, complete with plenty of high tech, low life characters and plots points, in a way that felt fresh and classic simultaneously. The biotech-infused identity crises of an unlikable narrator and the noir saga woven throughout was complex and engaging.   

My biggest issue with this book is that it should be longer. I don't mind fast moving stories that require hardcore attention to follow, but I had to skip backwards and reread parts of this book more than usual. I can be a slow processor and reading does take me more time than average. But, I really would have enjoyed a bit more world building and drawing out of this grotesque and fascinating story.  

Counterweight requires intense attention, but it pays off and is an enjoyable read for cyberpunk and other scifi fans out there. I admit that the author's mysterious identity is a draw as well. I tend to read about every author online after finishing a book and could not find much at all about Djuna. A surreal biography for a surreal book. 

This was also posted to my Goodreads.

Book Review: The Circumference of the World

 

Image: The cover of the book is a graphic with a background of deep green circles spiraling towards the center becoming darker until becoming black, resembling an eye. On top of that are more circles of yellow and green resembling moon phases spiraling into a center where a figure with pulled up long hair and a dress is silhouetted in oranges, walking along a curved line like a tightrope. The bottom has a large reddish orange circle like a rising sun peaking upward. Across the top in red letters is "world fantasy award winner," then in white letters, "lavie tidhar," then in cream, "the circumference of the world." Across the bottom in small white letters is, "can we just all admit now that Lavie Tidhar's a genius?" and in yellow, "-Daryl Gregory: award-winning author of spoonbenders."

Reading Lavie Tidhar's The Circumference of the World was like walking through a dream, or perhaps a nightmare depending on your view of things. I don't mean reading about a dream. I mean it felt like dreaming feels- where many things are off or confusing or seem not quite right, but also feel quite real and make sense at the same time. It is difficult to describe without spoiling the story and what is revealed as it moves forward. It is one of those books that seems to hop around too much, but closer to the end, the bigger picture is revealed to the reader, making the whole thing seem just right.

Something about this book that is interesting to me is the use of the culture- and actual people, real and fictional- from the golden age of science fiction in the mid 1900s. The whole feel of that pulp era was captured really well, misogyny, conformity to great-man, narratives, and all. Well, I wasn't alive until the 80s, but it captured my impressions from my parents bookshelves and reading the books from and about that time period. There are sections that include (fictionalized) conversations between well known authors whose names and works I recognized. But, upon reading the entire book and skimming some reviews, there were apparently also characters woven in from that era of stories. Being less familiar with them, I did not recognize this. I imagine it could be quite a joyous experience for someone who is more familiar. I still don't know which characters were borrowed (with permission) and which were crafted.

The style of this book hops genres all over the place, but is still tied together by Tidhar's prose. It begins like a vintage sicfi-fantasy novel that turns into a bizarre noirish story of a bookseller turned detective. Further forward we have authoritarian regime survival historical fiction, hard scifi, mystery, autobiography, and more. Each time I thought I was grasping what would be revealed, I was surprised in new ways. I do think it actually could have been longer. Sometimes it transitioned so fast that I would have liked more time spent in certain places.

Now, I will say, I don't know if this book is for everyone because it has so much of... everything. If you aren't one to appreciate bizarre breaks from single narrative structures, this may not be for you. Me? I loved it every step along the way, and especially when it became clear why reading it felt so dreamlike. You will have to discover that for yourself.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Charlotte and the Chicken Man

 

Image: The cover of the book has a background composed of a close-up of the blue human iris, the pupil encircled by the title of the book in yellow letters. To the right of the eye, partially obscuring it, is a black and yellow illustration of a woman looking towards the center of the cover. A tan assymetrical oval shape is at the bottom of the iris with Aina Hunter's name in red stenciled letters. The bottom of the cover is a red background with the book's byline- the inevitable nigrescence of charlotte-noa tibbit- in black and yellow letters.

 I am going to break with my usual process and begin this review of Aina Hunter's Charlotte and the Chickenman with an excerpt from the publisher's about section as I believe it captures the feel of this book well:

    Whisk(e)y Tit attempts to restore degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts. We are unwilling to sacrifice intellectual rigour, unrelenting playfulness, and visual beauty, often leading to texts that would otherwise be abandoned in a homogenised literary landscape. In a world gone mad, our refusal to make this sacrifice is an act of civil service and civil disobedience alike, and our work reflects this. 

I originally delayed writing this review so that I could include thoughts from when Hunter kindly joined VINE Book Club to discuss the text. Afterward, I delayed writing it again to figure out how I wanted to write about it. I am not sure if it is due to my medically foggy mind or if I am just not sharp enough to grasp things, but it took me a very long time- almost to the end of the book- to realize that it was going backward in time. I believe this is on me as others in the book club seemed to have figured it out sooner. Due to this, the book did not seem to match the description- which I was very excited about reading. However, I still found it fascinating in the ways I experienced it.

In my head, this book read as if a prompt for writing about a character was handed to several different people with several different writing styles, instructing them to each write about the protagonist using a different genre and time period. I don't think I have ever read anything like this before and the experience ranged from being engrossed in fascinating dialogue across an... unconventional dinner table to the batshit descriptions of sperm bots and dairy cows. Hunter's ability to write from different genres, perspectives, dialects, and more was impressive and engaging. 

This book is also very Queer and species inclusive, which was not a surprise based on the description. I really enjoyed the unique and bizarre ways the author navigated these realms. In discussion with the book club, I found Aina Hunter to be very candid, vulnerable, humble, and willing to put a lot of thought into her answers to every question we asked.

Throughout the group, we learned that Hunter never intended to write scifi in the first place and that she does not read it much. To get that kind of fresh composition was also interesting. Hunter also told us about how the reverse chronology was a decision made late in the writing process rather than beforehand. I want to say, for those of us who aren't quite as quick witted, I wish there would have been a clearer way of marking the time in which each chapter took place. Would that take away from the avant-garde style of the book and the delightfully wild mission statement from the publisher? I am not sure. 

I have deliberately left out most details of the story as the description already conveys a lot to the reader and due to the choppiness, I fear I would spoil things. This book was definitely a wild ride that I enjoyed going on and it gave me a lot to think about- not just about the story itself but about what fiction writing could be on a wider scale.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Deep Care

Image: The cover of the book is a purple background with a black line illustration of three people locked arm in arm in protest and two more harms holding each others hands at the bottom. In large gold lettering are the words Deep Care and in smaller white lettering between those two words is the byline: the radical activists who provided abortions, defied the law, and fought to keep clinics open. At the bottom in tiny white letters is the author's name, Angela Hume.

 Angela Hume's Deep Care is a gorgeous ethnography of resilience and resistance. Hume's focus is predominantly on "Self Help" movements and other abortion activism and defense in the Bay Area from the 1970s-90s, which allows for a lot of interesting specificity and a deeper understanding of what it was like to be involved in feminist movements during these times in that area. "Self Help" in its original use and context was not a "get healthy with these 5 easy steps" book. It was a form of community healthcare and mutual aid based in knowing ourselves and each other and providing for all of our needs. She described her intent to create a work of historical scholarship and political theory in order to "educate, agitate, and inspire." Growing up conservative, she describes this book as "the biggest no of her life," after a life where she often wasn't allowed to say no.

Hume's writing style is accessible and inviting. I often felt like I was in the room with the people whose history she described (even to the point of having a little too much of an empathetic reaction during descriptions of procedures.) Hume uses materials and story telling from the time period to show the kind of education and practice that was going on in circles of the womens movement both before abortion became as politicized as it is now and after. There is a lot of focus on the legacy of Pat Parker- stellar organizer and poet- who is no longer with us to be interviewed. The people who were able to be interviewed varied greatly in both demographics and ability to be exposed, so pseudonyms are used at times. Some of my favorite people were anarchists using pseudonyms that I hope I can run into some day by accident. 

I thought frequently during this book about how we discuss medical history- these brilliant white men and their knowledge and discoveries, sometimes bravely testing things on each other, sometimes horrifically practicing on enslaved and marginalized people. These men end up in history books and medical texts. I do not see the history of abortion providers and their amazing ingenuity, persistence, brilliance, and bravery in general texts.

There is more inclusion of racial justice and sexuality in this book than other texts I have read about abortion. I had never heard of the group RAW (Roots Against War) before this book and they were one of my favorite organizations. As with any movement that spans identities and struggles, there is also much discussion of the struggles and infighting that occur in many radical movements. How do we pay for things while also not being profit driven? Is there an ethical way to use capitalism to pay for clinic services so they do not disappear? How do we get the word out while also staying safe? Race, sexuality, and class disparities resulted in conflict at times- much of which was solvable, some of which was not. The reality of sacrifice is very present through the entire book- people barely holding it together while making abortion and other gynecological healthcare their entire life. Lots of fear and burnout, especially when antis were showing up to beat and murder people. I know from my own experiences that many of them use anti-abortion as a smokescreen for misogyny and bloodlust. I have met anti-choicers who have said and done some of the most vile things I have ever seen, making it near impossible for me to believe any of them cares about wittle babies- especially the men.

There are also age-old disagreements about tactics and level of risk. Clinic defense was obviously a critical part of the movement keeping clinics alive at all- this book made me see this as even more prevalent than I realized. Yet, today some people (usually admirable and hard working clinic workers and volunteers from Planned Parenthood) argue that no one else but the antis (and clinic escorts) should be out there in order to reduce the commotion around the clinic. I very much understand this perspective and also disagree with it. The history in this book made me disagree with it even more. 

When I was involved in clinic defense in the past, it worked best when we worked with those who worked and volunteered at the clinic, rather than just show up and do our own thing. We did things like distract the "counselors" from harassing patients, created large affirming signs of support that we used to cover antis' grotesque and misinforming imagery, and found ways to drown them out while keeping things as chill as possible. Patients actually liked it as did escorts. We all learned about each others strengths and weaknesses. But, there came a time when it did get too rowdy outside as each side amplified their level of aggresison and we backed off. I still think it was and is the right thing to do to find ways to combat antis while showing support for patients. The kinds of clinic defense described in this book were creative and inspiring. After the repeal of Roe v Wade, and after reading about clinic defense against operation rescue (christo-fascist anti-choicers willing to kill abortion providers,) I wonder if clinic defense needs to hardcore come back into style. How much has seeing only anti-choicers with giant gory signs at clinics and never any dissenting voices affected abortion access overall? What I would like to see even more is organizing against fake clinics that pose as abortion clinics then lie to and abuse patients into staying pregnant. 

 Another discussion I liked was an opposition to the characterization as "just a medical procedure." I had not thought of it this way, but we can discuss how abortion is healthcare without trying to hide it as being exactly like anything else. It is a valid form of healthcare regardless of its similarity to other procedures. Lori (not her real name) was a favorite of the book as she talked frankly about death and complications. We don't need to pretend that abortion care- or any healthcare- never has complications (I am writing this while suffering cancer surgery and treatment complications despite having skilled and caring practitioners) nor do we need to pretend there is never any death involved in human life. 

Those who moved on from Self Help to become trained nurses and doctors caution against seeing this history as a simple explanation of how things can be for abortion access. While these people created amazing Self Help movements out of necessity, abortion is still done ideally by medical professionals in a society where healthcare is free or at least affordable and in a setting that meets the medical needs of whatever the procedure is (be it pills to take home or an in office procedure.) I think the history in this book is important to understand how we got to more accessible abortion and how to get back to that and beyond, rather than as a call for everyone to learn and start practicing menstrual extraction. However, it may come to that and in the worst case, of abortion continuing to become less and less accessible, these types of groups may be the only option. 

Hume includes various ideas for actions we can take going forward that are helpful and thorough. The only thing I yearned a bit more for in this book is a discussion of clinic defense today with the activists involved in clinic defense in the 80s and 90s. We do hear the perspective of a person who designed the (brilliant, necessary) clinic escort system. She suggests that patients don't want to walk through an even larger protest, which I understand. But, to the clinic defenders from RAW and BACAOR (Bay Area Coalition Against Operation Rescue,) do they believe the same kinds of actions should be taken today? What new tactics could be used to match things we have learned and diverging opinions about protesting antis and defending clinics? I could listen to anyone in this book talk for hours and never get bored.

Overall, this is one of the best texts of abortion history that I have had the pleasure to read. While the focus on the Bay Area limits the knowledge of the Self Help movements at large, it also allows a more intimate understanding and experience of part of the movement- something equally valid and important. This book is well written and absolutely did educate, agitate, and inspire me. 

This was also posted to my goodreads.